Nanowrimo is on!

It's November again and if you are like me that only means one thing: Nanowrimo! (Okay, it also means Thanksgiving and shopping and such, but you know what I mean, right?)

This year I am battling just about everything to get my new Nano-project off the ground. The story I develop will play a major role in the next year of Metahuman Press publications, but right now my Nano-writing has been slow going. With a new more intensive day job, more responsibilities as an editor of a full line of  books and a nasty bout of bronchitis, week one of Nano has not been pretty.

As I type this, it is Day 8 and I am only 3,766 words into my story. That puts me about 10,000 words behind the eight ball.

However, I have gained a renewed speed when I do get the time to lay word to page, so hopefully that will translate into a very fruitful weekend of writing for me.

Wish me luck and let me know what you are Nano-writing!

National Novel Writing Month is underway!

I am nearly 12,000 words deep in this year's Nanowrimo entry with more words to come later today after a nap. I've quite enjoyed my work on my Nano novels over the past two years, though I still haven't quite finished either work. My first work, working title Neo-Tokyo, was an adventure story that basically took my ideas of what a manga-inspired superhero world would actually look like. I plan to revisit it in the near future, finish it up, and possibly release it as the first MHP original novel not featured on the site.

Last year I wrote American F.O.R.C.E., which recently spun out of the end of Long Hot Summer. That will run for the next year or so before branching out in to an even bigger story.

This year, I'm working on my other planned spin-off of Long Hot Summer, the continuing tales of Susan Benjamin under her new heroic identity as Suicide Blonde. I just started the third chapter today and I'm enjoying it more than anything I've written in months. It's also one of my first attempts to really try a first person narrative and so far I think it's going pretty well. MHP readers can expect it to appear much quicker than F.O.R.C.E., probably in January 2011.

I have at least one more update planned for this month at Take the Helm, and I am hoping to have another update with big news about more regular updates from my sphere of writing. Stay tuned for that.

A Few Tweaks....

I am going to come out of blogular silence for a bit with a few updates.

The Metahuman Press site has been updated with a few new visual tweaks, mostly thanks to updates on both WordPress and the ArrasTheme. It may need a few more before I'm fully appreciative of the new look, but everything should be accessible as of now.

No new Arc this week, folks. I've been a bit under the weather as has the family, so I just didn't have time to layout and edit the Tyler Marsh chapter I had planned. Tyler will be back next week, I promise.

Pulp Empire volume three should be available to purchase near the beginning of the month. Right now the first stories, "An Incident in a Small Town" by Travis Heermann and "The Other Fellow's Shoes" by G. Lloyd Helm have gone up, so you can check them out at the site.

A new partner site, The Dead Walk Again is now accepting story submissions. We are looking to launch it full time beginning next Spring, but we really need to get some content up and running. So if you like zombies, please be sure to check it out, and maybe even submit something!

This blog will remain mostly quiet for the next few weeks as I participate once again in Nanowrimo. Once November has passed, I will be back to blogging (semi-)full time, so stay tuned for more updates. For more regular updates, you can also follow me on Twitter.

Quick Nanowrimo Update

My National Novel Writing Month entry is coming along swimmingly. I have finished over a quarter of my word count a day ahead of schedule. I have actually slowed over the last couple days while not at work, so the “write it overnights between calls” system I have in place is coming along magnificently.

To help anyone interested to chart my progress, I decided to add a handy word counter over their to the right of this. It will be up until the end of the month so you can follow along!

Enough procrastinating for me, back to work!

Out For Vengeance 7 Notes

Just a note: I am coming right along on Nanowrimo. I am at 8,400 words already, which puts me more than a day ahead so far! Wooo, me!

As for this chapter of Out For Vengeance, I think it came off really well. It does a great job of really building the mystery of who this Robert Benton may or may not be while also moving along his hunt for his identity.

Amanda will be popping up quite a bit in future chapters, as will several of the other support characters that have came and gone in the first few chapters. But Vengeance has a one track mind at this point, and we need to cover his quest before we can move on to the broader question of just what the hell is happening in New Salem.

The Complete Clone Saga 6: Funeral for the Octopus

Before we continue with the main storyline of the Clone Saga, a few digressions pop-up. First, Spider-Man artist Tom Lyle writes the eighth issue of Spider-Man Unlimited, drawn by Ron Lim. And in a true bit of eeriness, the story revolves around an attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. And just to add some tension, Mary Jane is among the hostages taken. Spider-Man and Scarlet Spider both go to the tower to settle different scores. They never quite meet, but they both take out their own members of the criminal Terror Unlimited and save the city in the process. Nothing overly ambitious here, and excepting the eeriness of a WTC attack plot, nothing of note.

After those events, we move on to the three issues of Spider-Man: Funeral For an Octopus. In the aftermath of his cure, Peter Parker must deal with the ramifications of Otto Octavius’ death, while Ben Reilly has uncovered a mini-arms race, as an evil businessman as well as four of Doc’s allies in the Sinister Six are all after Doctor Octopus’s weapon cache. As the first issue ends, the Scarlet Spider confronts the combined forces of Vulture, Mysterio, Hobgoblin, and Elektro.

Issue two is for the most part a prolonged fight scene as Scarlet Spider battles the four remaining members of the Sinister Six. He is no match for the combined might and gets left under a crumbled roof. The villains attack a government building looking for Octavius’ weapons. Spider-Man stops them and retrieves an extra pair of Doc Ock’s arms. With their aid, he holds his own. But the arms malfunction and start dragging him away from the battle to parts unknown. As the issue ends, the villains have their own problem... as Kaine arrives!

The arms are running amok outside and attack the security detail at the building. Scarlet Spider breaks free, even as Kaine prepares to slay Mysterio. But he finds that the costume is occupied only by a robotic dummy. He continues to fight Elektro. Spidey tears apart the harness to free himself from the wild octopus arms. He swings off and inadvertently saves Elektro from the mark of Kaine. Meanwhile, Mysterio is actually using his illusions to get the info on Octavius’ weapon from a wayward relative, but Scarlet Spider shows up and stops him. The story abruptly comes to an end here, as does this report.

Next time, back to regular continuity as the Spider-books officially go weekly with “Smoke and Mirror”.


Just as a reminder, I will be going in to Nanowrimo mode for November, so updates will be sparse.

Super-Powered Comics: The Goon: Chinatown & the Mystery of Mr. Wicker

This will be the last week of regular updates on this page for quite some time. Starting at the beginning of November, I will be participating in the annual National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. Nanowrimo. I might stop in with a couple irregular reviews (just to break up the writing of the novel), but otherwise I will be concentrating on my 50,000 words. But for now, let’s get to the review.

Eric Powell has been writing and drawing The Goon for over a decade at this point, but we never really got a good look at the character’s past. That changes in Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker. The story moves back and forth from the past (told in beautiful sepia tones) and the present day (in the book’s regular palette. After a short introduction, we meet Shorty and his chanteuse sister Mirna. They both regularly work at Goon’s favorite bar.

Mirna’s good looks bring us back to a younger, unscarred Goon. He sees another beauty as he visits Chinatown and the ancient warlord that serves as the neighborhood’s crime boss. Needless to say, Goon gets embroiled in the dame’s life which leads to more problems between his and Frankie’s own burgeoning crime empire and that of the Chinatown set.

In the present, Goon deals with a very different problem, that of the strangely covered new crime boss Mr. Wicker.

The two stories weave in and out of each other with the subtle grace of the most talented filmmaker. It is a style not often seen in comics but works to perfection under Eric Powell’s able hand.

Both plots build to a fevered pace, but it is the past story of Chinatown that really shows the skill of Powell. In the process, we learn the origin of the powerhouse’s trademark look.

Let me just say that I know The Goon is by no means everyone’s cup of tea. But if you like Hellboy, if you like Umbrella Academy, hell, if you just like some one of the finest pieces of graphic fiction this decade, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Chinatown. Highest Recommendation.

Mean Streets 11 Notes: The Final Chapter

A quick warning: these notes may be a little more spoiling than regularly. So if you haven’t read the chapter yet, please go do so.


This is it: the end of Mean Streets. I started Mean Streets as an experiment, one that never quite came together the way I hoped it might. It turned in to something overly jumpy and even more crass than I originally planned. My concept was somewhat different: take the concepts and conflicts that ran through one of the most entertaining wrestling companies in history, ECW. I think I managed to channel some of Extreme Championship Wrestling’s spirit in to a few of the characters, but Mean Streets quickly became an uncontrollable beast to write.

So I decided to end it. And what better way to end a story than to destroy most of what I built?

Many of the characters’ endings were planned from the beginning, although in many cases I mean their stories to go on much longer. Jack Flash and Antagonist in particular had a much more detailed past. A good writer is never afraid to recycle discarded ideas, so for now I’ll keep the details to myself.

The mi-go’s super-creatures meet an ignoble end here, but they may yet find away to return in another story in the future. I like these characters a lot and think they may have untapped potential when they move past mindless killing machines.

A couple characters in this story will pop up next year in the new series I will be working on next month for Nanowrimo. And yes, Demon Fox will be one of them. I can’t well leave a superhero carrying an Elder God inside her sit idle too long, can I?

While I am not entirely please with the way the saga finally ended, I hope everyone who read it enjoyed Mean Streets. It was a noble experiment with a decent story and some truly unique characters. Thanks for following it.

NaNoWriMo Comes to an End

I have finally brought my first NaNoWriMo experience to an end with a (barely) successful first 50,000 words of Neo-Tokyo. Although the story isn’t quite finished (I would estimate another 20,000 words at least), it does feel good to get that much on to the screen in one month’s time. I am going to try to maintain a continued writing discipline of around 800 to 1000 words a day at least 5 days a week. Wish me luck on that one.

I have been dreadfully negligent on pretty much everything else super-hero related in the mean time. I still haven’t watched last week’s Heroes and I am about a week behind on all my comics and graphic novels. With the stress of nearly 2,000 words a day off my back I should be getting back up to speed though. I have a couple archived articles I will get posted in the next few days and we will go from there.

I may have a new comic property in the works over the next few days. I will let everyone know on that soon as more news pops up. Metahuman Press will be back to updating at a regular pace as well.

Thanks for everyone’s patience while I worked myself to the bone. I have plans to participate in NaNoWriMo again next year, but now that I know what it entails, I will probably change a few of my plans to more readily update. In the mean time, thanks for reading.

Heroes Episodes Eight and Nine

My apologies for the lateness in the first half of the post, but with NaNoWriMo going on, I used most of my days for sleep. Last week’s Heroes fell by the way side to just before I watched tonight’s show. Sad, considering it’s easily the best episode this season.


We seem to get the season back on track as we go in to flashback mode with “Villains”. Hiro (apparently) goes on a viewing spree as he watches the events of one year ago. Eric Roberts returns as Thompson to bring Meredith in to the folds of the Company, while Noah and Elle work together as we see their pre-season one investigation of Gabriel Gray, even as he transforms himself in to Sylar.

We learn bits and pieces of the history of Arthur and Linderman, and the investigation by Nathan as a DA on Linderman. How it was not Linderman that ordered the attack on Nathan’s car at all... We finally learn what turns Angela against her husband as she learns what her husband has planned for Nathan. But even as Arthur acts, Linderman plots behind his back. He shows Angela the true nature of her husbands actions, and how he manipulated her mind again and again. Angela recruits the Haitian and several ounces of poison to eliminate her husband, but Nathan’s untimely arrival leads to Arthur’s chance at survival.

Meredith’s short career as an agent does give us one bright spot, as she encounters Danny Pine, a man the internet already nicknamed Hobolossus. Let’s hope we can see more of him soon. Anyway, things devolve when Flint, apparently Meredith’s brother, is also captured, and Meredith goes to free him. Thompson shows an amazing depth of character as he lets Meredith suddenly go free after she betrays the company.

Elle’s appearance in his life seems to be a saving grace for Gabriel, but Noah’s manipulation only causes more of Sylar's moral decay. We learn that Sylar may not have the loose moral standards we once thought.

The episode ends with Hiro wakening, and the sudden death of the African seer at Arthur’s hand. Arthur grabs Hiro....



Which is where we open on episode 9, “It’s Coming”. Arthur wipes Hiro’s mind down to that of a ten year old, but Ando saves him from death and helps him escape back to Japan. Ando begins a slow quest to reteach his friend how to use his powers, but Hiro has some problems taking things seriously.

Arthur returns to Sylar... and in an attempt to cure his bloodlust locks him in a room with Elle. Elle’s reaction is less than friendly, as she rips him apart with an electrical attack... He accepts the attack and encourages her to make more. Their confrontation cures Elle’s overpower, while somehow unlocking Sylar’s power mimicry as he finds he can now use her powers. They seem to be on the return to their romantic inclinations shown last episode.

Claire helps Peter escape an attack by Knox and her uncle Flint. But when she goes back to confront them, she learns it isn’t Peter they’re after at all. Peter uses his mind instead of his powers to save the day and help Claire get away.

Parkman and Daphne go looking for help at Primatech, but he only finds an unconscious Angela. Nathan makes the decision to free her mind, but may be just putting himself in the sites of fellow psychic Arthur. Parkman can’t find a way out of Angela’s mental crisis and finds himself stabbed by a psychic projection of Daphne. Daphne enters the dreamworld, and Parkman learns of her double dealing when Arthur arrives. Parkman confronts Arthur, but Angela forces Arthur to free them.

Nathan confronts his father. Arthur makes the same offer Linderman did back in season one, but this time Nathan isn’t as ready to make a deal with the devil for “the good of mankind”. Nathan leaves, but Jessica returns to speak with Arthur and make a deal for her future...

Mohinder’s experimentation proves a failure, as they are missing a third component, a human based catalyst, but his actions remain shady at best. Maybe something will actually come of this storyline soon...

Ando takes Hiro to a comic shop where 9th Wonders opens his eyes for the first time. They learn of the coming eclipse in its pages.

The episode ends with the villains coming together, but the heroes do so as well. Surrounded by Parkman, Peter, Nathan, Claire, and Daphne, Angela reveals the existence of the human catalyst and lays out the plans for their new mission: to stop Arthur from finding the catalyst. And Claire realizes exactly what Syler meant by how “special” she was...



Robert Fresco wrote Villains, his first episode of the show, and while it ties together stories from over two seasons in a way that could only be planned, the fresh look on the characters actually makes the show shine more than it has since season one. Series creator (and clearly best writer) Tim Kring returns for It’s Coming to continue the streak of quality episodes. Finally, this season’s first story arc is coming together despite the worst attentions of the season’s first several episodes. With their continued participation, and the recent removal of the overly influential (and not in a good way) Jeph Loeb, Heroes might just survive yet.

Quick Nanowrimo Update

Just a reminder that I will be participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) throughout November, so my updates will be infrequent at best. I do have a back log of super-powered fiction reviews to cover that I will intersperse through out the month, as well as my weekly Heroes blog.

Thanks all for reading!

Timeline, Epsilon, NaNoWriMo, and more

My apologies to my regular readers. Sometimes life and family get in the way of honest pursuits like writing and updating this blog. But hopefully I am back to stay as I get to work on several new updates over the next couple of weeks.

I will start with a couple updates on the site. I am slowly working towards getting pictures for all the contributing authors. I am also working towards reformatting the main site and possibly getting the first few books based on MHP works. More on that later.

Also, I am working on a new Timeline story for the week of Halloween. It will be the first to feature a setting that will interlink with other stories down the line.

Epsilon will probably go on hiatus following the conclusion of the Nephthys arc. I have more plans for the next arc, but I really need to take a break from one of my current works in order to get my current stories (as well as a few new ones) off the ground.

Finally, I have plans to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. I am currently working up a plot for another Quadrant Universe tale with the working title Neo-Tokyo. It will be a fun litte piece of super-powered fiction with quite an anime influence to it. I am currently working on a few pieces of research to get the idea flowing a little harder. I am also taking suggestions on anime/manga with a super-powered flavor. I am currently rewatching Yu Yu Hakusho and rereading Akira and Getbackers. Your suggestions on any other quality manga/anime with a superhero flavor set in either modern or a near-future setting would be appreciated.

I am going to try to get a post up today or tomorrow with my thoughts on the first three weeks of Heroes soon as well. Fingers crossed, I will be back here soon!

NaNoWriMo and Other Updates

So I continue to work my way through more Champion City volume two. I am at about 20,000 words at this point which puts me a little behind the curve as I should be at about 24,000 or so by now. I hope to catch up with my writing over the weekend but even if I do keep up at my current rate I have to say that I will be happy with an output of 40,000 words. That’s damn impressive IMHO.

I have a few other projects I am working on getting up this month too. You can find the newest chapter of my Epsilon saga right here. I will have the next chapter of Freedom Patton up next week. This will begin the much shorter Letters From Libertad feature that makes up a break from the first novel-length story and the next one, which is tentatively titled Freedom & Justice.

My apologies to Mean Streets fans out there. The project has sort of fallen by the way side in favor of my continued work on NaNoWriMo. I promise I will bring it back next month though.

Nanowrimo

So I’m feeling better now. Not 100% by any stretch, but at least back on solid foods and holding everything down. Not quite so exhausted constantly either.

Yesterday I mentioned I had another project I was working on this month and it's made to coincide with a little thing called National Novel Writing Month (or Nanowrimo for short). The concept is pretty simple. You take all of November and try your best to write a complete novel in that month. I tried (and failed miserably) with an ill-conceived science fiction project last year, but this year I decided to stick with something a little more near and dear to my heart.

So I’m writing a little project called Champion City volume two.

Anyone who has actually been reading what I write since the Wei Empire days knows that Champion City was my first super-hero fiction project and introduced Freedom Patton along with a couple dozen other characters. I am already working on expanding and rewriting large chunks of that work to make it both more readable and more solid a piece of fiction. Volume one was literally my first fully realized piece of long fiction, and it definitely showed it in places. Hence, the revision.

But as I started the revision, I also realized I was ready to get the next project rolling and Nanowrimo was what it took to convince me. Seven days in and despite the illness I am already over thirty pages in. That’s all hand-written by the way. The goal is 50,000 words in one month which probably won’t even get me to the half-way point of my story as I am already a respectable 7500 words or so in. A little behind the curve, but I figure if I can even average half that every month after this, I could really start unleashing the insane flow of fiction floating in my head out upon the world.

Just a few thoughts on the subject. You can expect Champion City volume two to hit the main page some time next year, probably about the same time I bring the revised version of volume one (hopefully) to print.

And yeah, I really meant to mention this before the end of October so I could encourage everyone to give Nanowrimo a try. That being said, I personally don’t think Nanowrimo needs to be in November. Why not make every month your own personal Nanowrimo? It couldn’t hurt could it.